Elusiveness of Trauma

Slippery Definitions

I’m a Rhetorician and what this means is that I spend a lot of time thinking about and teaching how to communicate effectively, how to persuade and what words mean—their definitions, connotations and associations.

This means that I am usually the person in the faculty meetings who says—yeah but what does critical thinking mean? Mean to you? To me? Is it shared or are there differences? Discrepancies?

I find that a great deal of miscommunication and misinterpretations happen when we fail to address our terms and agree on them, to achieve a common understanding.

Therefore, as someone with complex PTSD, and as a trauma survivor, I—of course—spend a lot of time thinking about:

What IS trauma?

But here’s where it gets dicey:

Trauma eludes easy definitions. It is slippery. And elusive.

That is because what constitutes trauma for one, may not for another. Trauma is self-determined. It has to be, since they are lived and embodied experiences. It involves our bodies and minds. And essentially, as I’ve written about previously, what indicates trauma for one may not indicate trauma for another.

That makes “classifying” trauma challenging.

This is also then why we have people ranking them, creating those hierarchies that I so despite—the fucking little ‘t’ and big ‘t’ trauma distinctions.

We don’t get to play judge, to “evaluate” whether something is bad enough to be considered trauma, for another person and their body.

Our matrices vary amongst our bodies and minds.

It is what is fascinating and maddening about it.

I love to define terms; it is important to achieving common understanding. But I am also a contradiction in terms.

Because I also study decoloniality and decolonial options, in pedagogies, curriculums, assignments, etc. Both trauma and decoloniality defy categorizations, frameworks and easy definitions, as coloniality exists across the globe, for vast amounts of cultures and throughout centuries. Therefore, the work to de-construct that, living in a world where we can only imagine what it may have been like had colonializers and colonialism not existed, baffles.

Colonial discourse and understandings seek to box in; therefore, it only stands to reason that decoloniality would do the opposite.

I want to make a similar case in boxing in definitions of trauma: if we seek to ‘trap’ a solid definition of trauma then we must allow for variations and options, as with decoloniality.

To do otherwise, is to completely and entirely, miss the point.